Winter Blowout
There is nothing quite like the frosty sting of a winter gale in the North Atlantic; those winds that mercilessly hammer down upon the coast each year and all those that choose to occupy it. Immortalized in many a painting are the chaotic clashing, merging, and diverging of large turbid waves under the direction of the wind, enshrouding the beachfront in a permanent bank of sea spray. With the winds cutting into every crevice of exposed skin and lashing trespassers with sharp streams of sand, the message seems clear: the coast has been annexed and does not welcome visitors.
Then sometimes, quite suddenly, we might find a moment, an hour, or maybe just a day of calmness. The winds temporarily relieve their grip and the boundary between sea and sand reemerges from the clearing spray. We see the lifeless remnants of marine organisms the sea has spit onto the beach, but also some surprising inhabitants that, although obscured from view in the storm, never really left.
The sanderling is a remarkable wader found on these beaches, minute in size and weighing only 50g, it might appear fragile. Yet, this master migrator from the arctic is tough to the bone and spends its wintertime on the North Atlantic coast in a constant state of movement. Foraging in the ever-shifting no man’s land shortly appearing between the incoming and receding waterline, its life fully in tune with the period of the waves; a true ‘wave runner’. Ironically, capturing a moment of stillness in their highly active lives can be more tricky than one of movement. It takes a crawling, belly-to-the-ground approach to appreciate their perspective. One that instantly changes the perception of fragility, to a sense of belonging, there where the spumy waters meet the blowing sands.